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shall enter and who shall leave the region of the dead. He sits on the throne with God (331 7!7 125), and will be the assessor of God in the judgment (6-17), In all these respects God acts through Him. On the other hand, we see in Christ the Godward aspect of mediation in which He repre- sents us to God. As in Hebrews, though less explicitly, Christ is both priest and sacrifice. The opening description of Him as ‘clothed with a
arment down to the foot, and girt about at the Fecaita with a golden girdle’ (118), plainly points to priestly robes. But He is also the sacrifice. The most characteristic designation of our Lord in this book is ‘ the Lamb of God,’ a title which occurs 29 times: He ‘loosed (RV λύσαντι, following best MSS, instead of ‘washed,’ λούσαντι, AV) us from our sins by his blood’ (1°); the saints ‘have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb’ (7). Such language in a book that has many features of Judaism cannot but contain a sacrificial allusion. At the same time, here and elsewhere in NT, while the explanation of ideas of ‘ blood’ and ‘sacrifice’ must take account of the OT, the advance of the Christian revelation to higher and more spiritual conceptions of religion forbids us to limit the meaning to Jewish ideas. The spiritual essence of sacrifice, the surrender of will, is the specially Christian thought.
Conclusion.—All through the Bible the idea of mediation in both its aspects is continually appear- ing. In the OT we find it distributed among a number of persons and functions—in the patriarch, the king, the proukets the priest, the sacrifice, the ‘servant of the Lord.’ In the NT all these distinctions are merged in the sole mediation of Jesus Christ, both aspects of which are seen in His life and teaching, and in the apostolic writ- ings. Our Lord appears throughout as one sent by God to reveal Divine truth, to execute the Divine will, to bring deliverance to mankind from sin and ruin, to confer the gift of eternal life, and to establish the kingdom of heaven on earth. On the other hand, His action, to some extent His teaching, more explicitly the apostolic teachin (represented by St. Paul, St. Peter, St. John, an Ep. to Heb.), present Him as the Mediator with God on behalf of mankind, making intercession in His prayers on earth and in His heavenly life after the resurrection, but chiefly giving His life as a ransom, shedding His blood for the remission of sin, acting as a means of propitiation, doing God’s will, and dying as the perfecting of obedience to please God for the benefit of mankind, confirm- ing the new covenant by His death. The images of ‘blood’ and ‘sacrifice’ are drawn from the OT, and can be understood only when their origin and allusion are recognized. At the same time, since our Lord liberated religion from the external and material limitations of Judaism, this process must be acknowledged with regard to the priestly and sacrificial functions. The revelation of the Father- hood of God necessarily modifies the idea of inter- cession and eas y mediation. The revelation of His spirituality, and of the spiritual character of religion, carries with it freedom from material conceptions of sacrifice. The OT priest killed animals and sprinkled actual blood. Christ gave His life on the eross; but the reference to His blood has no such material connexion. We must take it metaphorically for His life surrendered in death. Similarly, since He was not, like the Jewish sacrifices, an oblation laid by a priest on an altar, His sacrifice must be interpreted spiritually, and its reality found in the spiritual act of giving Himself to God in death.
Explanatory theories, as that the ransom was paid to Satan (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa), that the atonement was offered to the rights of God, whcs¢
MEDICINE
suzerainty had been outraged (Anselm), that it was for the satisfaction of law and abstract justice (Protestant theologians, especially), that 1t con- sisted in our Lord’s repenting on our behalf (M‘Leod Campbell), ete., do not come within the scope of this inquiry, as they appear only in later speculations; and though all of them appeal to the Bible for the justification of their positions, none of them can claim to be results of pure exegesis, or even contents of strictly biblical theology. ;
LiveratTurE.—The place of mediation in foreign religions may be gathered from the Introduction to The Sacred Books of the East; the Hibbert Lectures; Monier Williams’ works on Hinduism and Buddhism; and Non-Christian Religious Systems (S.P.C.K). For treatment of the OT teaching see works of OT theology by Oehler, Schultz, Smend, Piepenbring, Bennett; Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites ; Trumbull, The Threshold Covenant. For the NT teaching see The T'each- ing of Jesus by Wendt ; do. by Horton ; works on NT theology by Beyschlag, Holtzmann, Bovon, Weiss, Stevens, Adeney ; Bruce, Vhe Epistle to the Hebrews; Ritschl, Die Lehre v. ἃ. Rechtfertiqung u. Versdhnung, 3 vols. (Eng. tr. of vol. i.). M‘Leod Campbell, On the Nature of the Atonement; R. W. Dale, U’he Doctrine of the Atonement; H. N. Oxenham, The Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement ; Bruce, The Humiliation of Christ ; Simon, The Redemption of Man, and Reconciliation by Incarnation; Dorner, System of Christian Doctrine; Cave, Script. Doct. of Sacrifice ; Pryce, ‘The Atonement,’ in Old Faith in New Light. W. F. ADENEY.